MILWAUKEE — Rob Blakely’s puppet team performs every week for an appreciative audience at a public park. But the show is not for kids. Rather, his Homeless Puppet Ministry entertains and evangelizes homeless adults by presenting the gospel in the context of gritty street stories, all performed by puppets.

“When they first saw us setting up the stage, they laughed at us, but when the show opened with a puppet pushing a puppet-size shopping cart, they started whooping and hollering,” says Blakely. “They were pulled in immediately.”

Taking a cue from Broadway plays and stand-up comedy, where puppets and dummies are making a comeback, church puppet teams are taking puppets to unlikely places.

Prison Puppets, a ministry of Westlake Baptist church of Charleston, S.C., takes it a step further, going to federal prisons and depicting inmate life with puppets. The shows deal with issues from prison violence to loneliness to remorse.

“You haven’t seen a puppet show until you’ve seen inmate puppets brawling in the yard,” says one puppeteer.

But their first performance was rough.

“I thought they were going to run us off the stage,” says founder Derek Saltzman, 28. “They wanted a show, and they were insulted to see puppets.”

But the next skit, about jailhouse betrayal, caused the inmates to fall silent.

“It disarms them,” Saltzman says. “They can’t believe these puppets with tattoos and knife wounds are talking about the deep things of an inmate’s heart.”

Back in Milwaukee, Homeless Puppet Ministry performs under freeway overpasses and in soup kitchens — wherever homeless people gather. The puppets are dressed in filthy clothes and have scruffy beards. One character is an active psychotic. Another is a failed CEO.